The Impossible Caregiver

COVID has put the spotlight on medical caregivers who exhaust themselves struggling to save the un-saveable. Reading through old speeches, I was reminded that in the 1980s and ‘90s AIDS, not COVID, begged for heroic caregivers. I singled out one who has guided us through both COVID and AIDS, Dr. Michael S. Saag, when keynoting an AIDS Symposium at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Dear, dear Michael – how we admire your brilliance. We’re grateful for your tenacity, and we can barely understand your boundless energy and productivity. Do you ever sleep?

Beyond the limelight where you love to act out some goofy Broadway song, after the lights have gone out in the lab, when your office is finally empty, we’ve seen you haunting the hallways of your clinic. You were still looking for the man whose life you could not save, the sweet woman who was never compliant, the nurse who could not hold another dying hand, the patient who was both rabbi and friend. One of the reasons we love you is that you’ve never let us go, even when death has taken us.

But there was more, not only about what you’ve done but about who you are. You never sought a famous list of patients, though others have and you could have. You never worried about your haircut, or made your bedside manner into that feigned sympathy we resent in caregivers who must hurry on to others.

You wore our blonde wigs and danced into our rooms, bringing us laughter when you could not bring us healing. In the midst of all the dying, however improbably, you have relieved us of our obsession with death. In the quiet of the night, I have sometimes wondered how you stayed sane and gentle amid the torrent of dying, where you found strength to point us to hope when we had none.

You have served us all well. How often have I heard you speak of science, and responded by speaking to you of miracles. You have taught us about knowledge and wisdom, and we have answered you with love….

Phenomenal Women

I was rummaging through old files and ran into a speech manuscript from six or seven years ago. An organization paying tribute to some “Phenomenal Women” asked that I keynote their event. Here’s some of what I said then and would be willing to say again.

Although I don’t place myself among them, I’ve known some phenomenal women. I knew the First Lady when she was broken by addiction and by breast cancer. Decades before it was fashionable, Betty Ford looked into the camera and told the truth. And I knew Elizabeth Glaser when her body failed but her spirit triumphed. She, like Mrs. Ford, was phenomenal.

In Ghana, it was a mother with AIDS who had lost all nine of her children to the virus; now, she  was caring for her dying sister. Inside Riker’s Island Women’s Prison, I met an amazing chaplain who loved the women others despise. In Rwanda, the woman for whom death in the Genocide might have been more merciful – she’d been raped, and mutilated, and shoved beneath the bodies of her children – came out of a crowd to gently ask how she might help me.

These women are bypassed in a culture obsessed with celebrity. They didn’t have Twitter accounts or Facebook pages. They did not crave headlines because they were not hunting for fame. Somehow, perhaps intuitively, they recognized that if name recognition is what matters most, Charles Manson would be our role model. Instead of nurturing celebrity, these women modeled character.

Then there was a women I met in Kansas City twenty years ago. We’d honored AIDS volunteers in a fund-raising champagne dinner hosted by a socialite who was well coiffed, wearing her three strands of pearls. As we sat together, occasionally chatting, she felt very…Republican. It wasn’t until we left that I discovered the truth.

As we came out of the ballroom into the warm summer evening, we were greeted by a busload of so-called “Christians” who’d driven in from rural Kansas to scream at us. They chanted “AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!” and “God hates fags!!!” and – pointing at me – “Die! Die!  Die!”

In the screaming and the chaos behind the police line, the “socialite” with whom I’d had dinner surveyed the screamers, then sidled up to me and said quietly, “We must be doing something right.” She was dead a year later. Cancer. As far as I know, she never asked for celebrity or fame. But, God – the woman had character. She was, in a word, phenomenal.

The 24-Second News Cycle

I’ve grown impatient with those rushing to judgment on President Biden’s performance.

In less than eight months the man has shored up our economy with emphasis on equity for the most vulnerable; dealt wisely with a rekindled pandemic fueled by his predecessor’s inflammatory rhetoric; rescued some 90,000-and-counting Afghans from the wrath of the Taliban and begun the restoration of our nation’s battered image in the eyes of the civilized world. A brutal act of terrorism killing Americans and Afghans was not his doing, especially in this 20-year war. I’d call his opening months a good start….